[Fylah: Once again, the shadow general Neralg has joined forces with dark elves to-]
*Click
[Fylah: Our kingdom is in dire danger, being attacked both by the plague and-]
*Click
[Fylah: You, my hero, adept of the divine vision-]
*Click
A window pops in the middle of the screen.
[The savior of Gonkdim against the renegade army. (Level: LEGENDARY)]
[Do you accept this quest?]
[Yes] [No]
The mouse pointer hovers over the [Yes] button, and with a click, the window closes.
"Tsk… how boring. Why doesn't it have an option to disable the lore?"
With three more angry clicks, the screen goes to a loading. From the monitor's dull light, a scraggly bearded man in his mid-twenties rests his chin on the palm of his right hand, dark circles around his tired eyes.
"I'm a professional grinder, not a kid wanting a story to sleep, fucking writers."
The screen brightens up, the sun shines a radiant yellow, its light rays pierce the scattered soft clouds, and green fields with blooming purple flowers cover the land from the character's dark boots to the beginning of a snowy mountain in the background.
This scenario breaks its staticity once the wind swipes through, the birds fly at the sky, and his character steps forward at a quick pace. An adventurer with plain short black hair and slightly tanned skin, one that he didn't care to customize from the first appearance the game randomized to him.
Even by wearing low-tier equipment and a dark ragged cloak to cover it all, its presence still emanates a natural obscure aura. At his hip, he keeps his strongest item, yet economical, a pair of shiny grey and slightly-curved knives with long ribbons coming out of their handles, red symbols written all over in its thin dark fabric, giving this character something like a double tail of cloth as he runs.
"The least they could do was add a fast travel near the mission. Wasn't this one of the opening events for this new update? Don't they have any good game designers?"
With a deep sigh, he leans back in his black gaming chair, extending his arms so he could still evade the random rocks that made his character stuck from time to time.
"Another four minutes to reach the dungeon, nice one, devs."
- - - - - - - - - - -
As a professional grinder, my job is to sell rare items for real money. But gathering those isn't easy, you need to spend hours on top of hours to get the resources to craft a single legendary item, which wanting or not, is the common type in the late game. That's why I do dungeons, they are the fastest way to farm, plus you won't be spending a lot of time running like an idiot and mining whatever the fuck you need, only to craft a single set. Yeah, it's high risk and sometimes you need to repair what you find, but it's way easier than handcrafting everything to pay the bills. Besides, I'm not here only for those…
There are also the Unique items, impossible to craft and the hardest item type to get, all because there is only one of each kind in the entirety of the game, so rare that even many beta players hadn't the luck to see one in action until this day. I, on the other hand, successfully sold three of them already. And, oh man, they are worth some months of work I tell you.
One was by pure luck when my grinding bots randomly picked up from a low-level farming area. The other I spent thirty days non-stop at dungeons that had increased dropping chances. And the last one I took from killing a player. What an idiot that one was, actually believing that I would help him to clear a legendary bounty for free, but what can I say? He doesn't deserve that item if he didn't know how difficult it is to get one.
​
That's how I managed to survive for all these years. Just like in a real job, all I need is to spend time to get money, so why not spend it smartly? Farming new legendary items and have a chance at getting a Unique, there's no way I could pass on that… or at least that's what I've been saying to myself, but this game keeps getting on my nerves lately…
- - - - - - - - - - -
"Tsk. Why is this here now?"
A giant ogre with three heads appears, blocking the only passage there is to a cave. It roars, waving its big tree log of a weapon and looking at the player from the other side of the screen with its six red shining eyes.
"A random mini-boss, what a luck. Right in front of the quest I need to go too…"
The man sighs tiredly, readying himself with a straighter posture in his chair.
"If I ignore him, I'll lure him inside and he'll blow my cover, but if I fight him…"
- - - - - - - - - - -
The thing I most hate in this game is that each area of the map is divided by difficulty levels, and when you die, you not only lose experience like most RPGs but you also have a probability of losing items and your character will remain dead for a certain amount of time. At Easy level, you don't lose XP, you have a very small chance of losing lesser items, and you remain thirty seconds dead. But as you increase in difficulty, every aspect of that rule increases exponentially.
Right now, I'm in a legendary region, the highest difficulty there is. Dying here means losing all the progress to my next level, a hundred percent chance of losing all my items, and the time my character will remain inactive is… an entire week. I shouldn't even need to explain that dying here is bad.
- - - - - - - - - - -
"All right… what level is he?"
His character's eyes shine golden, and above the Ogre's head appears the red name: [21st War Ogre, Shadow Army (Level 90+)]
"What, ninety-plus?! My scout can't even read his level, are you kidding me? I should have leveled him up a little more but… to think that a maxed energy character at level seventy-five can't see it… this guy would need an entire squad of players to be taken down."
He leans his back on the chair with an annoyed sigh.
The Ogre's steps tremble the ground, the purple petals of the surrounding flowers come off its stems on each earth shake. The ragged clothed adventurer stays still looking up at the Ogre stopping right in front of him. Salivating with anger, the monster raises its weapon to the sky, a weapon two to three times a human height.
"I hate this game so much."
The Ogre strikes down, exploding the ground and lifting a heavy cloud of dirt and petals.
A few seconds pass for the dust to disperse, revealing the giant weapon buried in a wide crater. The Ogre slowly lifts the heavy log, smashed flowers dropping from its tip, the veins of his eyes pulsate red as he looks around, to find nothing.
The wind blows the purple petals, gently going in the Ogre's forehead and torso then reappearing on his other side, as if he wasn't there to begin with. His eyes suddenly calm down, and with steadiness, he maneuvers the log to rest over his shoulder, and so, starts walking back to his guarding position at the cave entrance.
A window popup stays in the middle of the game menu:
[Disconnected]
[You safely disconnected and your character will return at the nearest Quick Travel.]
He closes it and a couple more clicks travel him to the last alternate server of the list. [Connecting to Gonkdim server 7]
"Four minutes of walking, again. Nice one, devs, everyone is laughing, so funny," – he says emotionlessly. – "It's already hard enough to keep a scout alive through an entire dungeon, and you put a mini-boss right in front of it."
On the screen, a drawn wallpaper of the same landscape he was before stays still, with a text on the bottom right: [Loading world…]
The man suddenly hits the table with his fist in a burst of anger.
"This is my last Alt dammit! If I lose this one, I'll have to do this dungeon blindly with my main accounts, all because of those stupid traps… Three times, fucking devs, three fucking times that you killed me in that stupid-ass level design. First, it's just a corridor, I turn on my Vision and there's nothing, I pass through, and look! It's a physical trap, Visions don't catch it! Stupid. FUCKING STUPID! How I'm supposed to trigger them safely if I can't see them, Devs? Answer me, dumbasses!"
But no one responds, the room stays quiet until he breathes in and sighs.
"Tsk. It's not like one of my main accounts would die hit-kill by those, but how I'm supposed to let my low-level scout through?"
The loading screen lights up again with the bright sun, and so his character appears from behind the camera, walking over so calmly and stopping at the focus of the scene, waiting for the user's input.
"I can't have my best characters dead for a week, item prices are at their highest near the update's release, unique items are worth hundreds of thousands right now, and because nobody claimed one yet, they are at their peak drop chance."
With a last deep sigh, he places his hands over the mouse and keyboard, and by pressing W, his character moves.
- - - - - - - - - - -
Samsara Fall Online's biggest update. New NPCs, new story arc, new missions, and most important of all: new items, including five new Uniques, so hard to get that only a few of the biggest players of the game have a single one, and the great majority being bought instead of having the luck to loot it.
Beyond the common four attributes slots of a legendary item, Unique tiers also have a fifth trait, an immutable ability that is unique to the game. The Devs themselves won't show what such abilities are publicly, but from what rumors, hackers, and lore-crackers have discovered, they are game-changing skills, not by their attribute numbers being off the charts but by adding new functionalities to the game that only the owner knows about.
I can attest to that, as all the three Uniques I picked had abilities that don't exist anywhere else in the game. Whatever, they are too much of a pain to use, always with a bunch of nonsensical rules that it's like signing a contract for your soul just to click the activation button.
My first one was called "Midas Hand", a golden gauntlet that transforms any item into pure gold. At first, I thought it would make me filthy rich. Imagine, being able to buy items cheaply and sell them by tenfold their initial prices, but no, the damn rules had to make it impossible, all because it needed for the object to have Energy and it had a limit of uses per month, plus the other dozen stupid rules. What a fucking waste.
​
Then my second item was the Scythe of Death, a weapon that could kill in a single hit. But of course, it had a low chance of that happening, triggering only in a critical hit, and had seven days of cooldown. Amazing. Not forgetting about the other rules which the target had to be lower level than you, have less maximum Energy, and bla-bla-bla.
While the last one, which I already forgot the name, was a talisman that allowed the player to instantly revive any characters he writes on a command block, but the rules stated that such character couldn't be in your account, and by using it the revived character and the one casting the spell would lose one level of experience, plus any lost items wouldn't come back. So why the hell would I keep it?
In my opinion, they would be way better without those damn rules, even if they broke the game a bit, it would still be fun as long they are so rare to have… Well, nothing out of the ordinary for those stupid devs, but whatever, as long there are power-hungry guilds buying and I'm the one profiting from it, I won't argue.
- - - - - - - - - - -
His character stomps a purple flower at a stop, his ragged cloak waves with the wind as he gazes forward.
​
"There you go, no Air Ogre or something," – he says looking at the entrance of the dungeon. – "Now, how to pass it?"